updated 07:45 pm EST, Wed February 1, 2006

Adobe's Mac commitment

Adobe today said it would not deliver native Intel versions of currently shipping professional products and that customers would have to wait until future major releases--which could be more than one year away--for native Intel Mac support. While noting an upcoming release of a native Intel Mac beta of Lightroom, its newly introduced professional applications for photographers, Adobe refused to provide additional release dates on the native Intel versions of its applications, except to say it was moving its development to Apple's Xcode development platform to help ease the Intel transition and was focused on the next major releases of its professional, which due to planned development cycles would delay the release of any native Intel Mac support.

The company, however, reiterated its support for the new Intel-based Mac platform, noting that at last year's Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen expressed "strong support" for Apple's transition plans: "We think this is a really smart move on Apple's part and we plan to create future versions of our Creative Suite for Macintosh that support PowerPC and Intel processors."

14 months away?

The next major release of the Adobe's Creative Suite could be between eight and 14 months away. Adobe declined to provide specific release dates--per company policy--but pointed to its "consistent track record of releasing significant upgrades" every 18 to 24 months. Adobe's Creative Suite 2 was release in April of 2005. The FAQ suggests that the earliest Adobe Creative Suite customers could see an upgrade with native Universal Binary support is September, but that the next major release could be as far out as April 2007.

Release of the recently acquired Macromedia platform may even be further away, as Macromedia delivered major software upgrades in August 8, when it released Studio 8, which included the popular Dreamweaver 8, Flash 8, and Fireworks 8. The company also only recently released Adobe Affect Effects 7.0, a major new release of its video editing software, which could mean that those customers would wait at least another 18 months before seeing a native Intel version.

Adobe admits performance gap on Intel Macs

During his keynote at Macworld Expo San Francisco, Jobs showed Photoshop running smoothly under Apple's emulation environment called Rosetta, but noted while Photoshop was usable for a few tasks, the performance would not be adequate for professionals.

While Adobe confirmed virtually all of its applications run under Apple's Rosetta emulation environment, it said that customers would experience a few problems as well as a noticeable performance gap.

"In general, applications that are not designed to run on Intel-based Mac computers, including current versions of Adobe's creative professional applications, may be noticeably slower than they are running on PowerPC-based Macs. Instead of experiencing much-anticipated speed enhancements, customers are likely to see some degradation of performance."

The company said that customers could mitigate some of these performance issues by using machines with large amounts of memory--at least one gigabyte of RAM, but recommends that professionals use PowerPC-based Macs for maximum workflow efficiency.

"Mac-based customers looking for optimal performance may prefer to run Adobe Creative Suite 2, Studio 8, and their components on PowerPC systems until we release future versions of our software as Universal applications," the company said.

In addition, it noted that Adobe's Version Cue Workspace, a component of Creative Suite 2, is not compatible with Rosetta.

Lightroom beta expected "shortly"

The Lightroom beta is expected "shortly" and will be available as a free download. The company said it will be able to quickly release an Universal Binary version of Lightroom because the application is currently in beta and does not require as much testing as release-quality software.

"Because this is a beta and not yet a certified, shipping product, we have more freedom to release it quickly without the exhaustive testing required of production software. Customers are encouraged to experiment with this beta version as a preview of the performance they can expect from future Universal releases of Adobe products."

No official support for Rosetta

Professional customers will only be able to turn to Adobe's online support resources for any questions or problems running its applications under Rosetta, as the company says it will direct callers to this website because it "may not be able to address installation or compatibility issues that arise from running under Rosetta."

According to the company FAQ, Adobe says that while Rosetta "should offer most existing applications a basic compatibility," it will not be extensively testing and certifying it to run under Rosetta and will focus on moving its software development to Xcode to support Universal versions of the next major releases.

Testing integral to transition

Adobe said it is currently working on or evaluating transition plans for most of its products, including Adobe Creative Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, InCopy, Acrobat Professional, and After Effects as well as its recently acquired Macromedia applications: Studio, Dreamweaver, Flash (both Professional and Basic versions), Fireworks, and Contribute.

"[We are] investing thousands of testing hours in certifying that Universal versions of our applications meet the level of quality our creative professional customers require. This includes testing on the new iMac and MacBook Pro systems that are shipping in the first quarter of 2006, as well as on any of Apple's upcoming Intel-based professional desktop systems."

The company, however, did not note any native Intel Mac development plans for Coldfusion MX, its development application to build and deploy Internet applications. The company released a new native Mac OS X in September, but did not provide any commtiment for the application.

Bad Deal

Now's the time for competitors to insert a product into the marketplace defined by users like myself, less than pure photoshop professional but more than the casual user. I'm frankly disappointed in Adobe's response.

Pay Back?

Third time's a charm.

Adobe blocked the move to yellow box (OpenStep on Rhapsody, the precursor to Cocoa) and eventually intel in 1997, then wanted such huge license fees for display postscript that Apple dumped it and replaced it with Quartz and Aqua. Quartz is snazzier, but it delayed OS X and DPS was significantly faster.

Now they're dragging their feet on converting to Intel. It's only been 8 years now that they've known this moment was coming... they more than anyone else. You don't suppose they were in denial all this time?

it's personal this time

I know the bad blood between adobe and apple runs deep, but does apple know how much this is going to hurt them while adobe drags their feet here?
We are a large adobe shop here, and the last rep who told us this wasn't anywhere as diplomatic as this story was. Forget one year, it's going to be 16-18 months before we see anything. This is the sort of thing that might push our business to pc's just so we can keep using current software.

Non-native filters

Note that Intel applications can't call non-native code such as plug-ins or filters. This means that all of your PhotoShop filters & add-ins have to be native as well. That wasn't the case with the 68k to PPC transition, since it was possible to mix code in a single application.

rok

okay, am i the only one who remembers how SLOW adobe was to release an os x-native version of photoshop? they were almost the last major third party app, so much so, steve had to call out photoshop BY NAME during a keynote (wwdc? macworld? i forget). this is hardly news. and seriously, photoshop cs2 (which i guess is, what, 9 by real world counting methods?) is one more patch on umpteen million previous patches over the years... it was herculean for them just to get carbonized. and every new version seems to want more... more processor... more ram... more screen real estate. i'd give anything to have a photoshop razed to the ground and rebuilt with all of the lesson learned over the years, and a new meaner, leaner photoshop as a result.

What's the big deal

Professionals that use Adobe products eight hours a day, five days a week are NOT going to use them on an iMac or 15-inch PowerBook (sorry MacBook Pro). They use Power Macs. Those "comsumer level" Intel Macs were released about 6 months ahead of schedule, partly to get developers motivated to release Universal binaries as soon as possible. I think it's a good move on Apple's part. If Apple had waited until mid-year to release the first Intel Macs, Adobe probably would have said 12-14 months from that date.

So just pretend that those early Intel Macs were not released. Besides, the Power Mac G5 Quad kicks butt now and it will still kick butt two years from now (or whenever Abode finally gets on board the Intel train). My wife uses a "single dual-core" Power Mac G5 (the "low end" 2.0 GHz config), and even that one is amazingly fast. It will be great machine for many year to come.

Adobe weighs 800 lbs...

... and is the gorilla of imaging. They will do as they please, and won't suffer because of it. Personally, I'm in no hurry to jump on the Intel bandwagon, and I need a machine upgrade. But I'll be waiting until the v.2 version of the pro Mac machines, which will probably coincide nicely with the CS release.

Painter was one of the first to go to OS X, and it didn't really make a dent in Photoshop's marketshare. Then again, Painter IX is finally a decent app, so it may be different this time around. But it's still not a replacement for Photoshop – nothing is, which is a problem.

If you bought a quad PPC or any other PPC machine, you should congratulate yourself – this is your payback.

Adobe's speed ?

Can we finally hope to see some decent speed on future release of Adobe products ? Photoshop or any other Adobe app always takes forever to load. Adobe never ported its apps to Cocoa but has so far stuck to Carbon. Adobe, remember Apple introduced Carbon to make the transition to OS X, not to keep your code forever Carbon ! Now Adobe is 'paying' the price of not investing in the Mac platform which still represents a big sales share of the company. Well, actually Adobe is so big they can do what they want. Anyone's really serious about seeing Quark go out of business ? Think again.

competition

this is great news for all of Adobe's competitors, for example I'm sure that Macromedia could finally push all of their apps to market much quicker than that, and finally win some of the market share they deserve ... oh wait a second that doesn't work ...

Speaking of Photoshop...

maybe Adobe could come up with a PS version which can open larger images. I don't know to which image resolution PS is stuck now, but considering the computers we now use, I don't see why we could not open bigger files, like 1bit Tiff files for CTPs.

MacIntel Tax

I had a feeling this would happen. Not only does the price of upgading to a MacIntel have to include the cost of upgrading the suite of programs we all use, now it's going to cause headaches for the next 18 months deciding when to purchase.

I know developers need to get paid for their efforts, but would it be that unusual to see some of them offer Universal versions of their apps and charge only a small sidegrade fee? With Adobe, if all you want is Universal compatibility, you'll also end up paying for the rest of the upgrade which may or may not be worth the price.

I look forward the hearing what the new MacIntels bring to the table performance-wise. If they don't greatly impress, I think it will only delay hardware purchases or push people to stay with PowerPC until there's no choice.

Lest We Forget

Adobe's stupidity goes way back. When Apple asked Adobe to improve the quality of its onscreen display of PostScript fonts, Adobe refused citing its commitment to the professional publication market. Adobe's actions motivated Apple to develop TrueType and wage the Font War. Apple enlisted Microsoft in its effort. Microsoft incorporated TrueType into Windows. The best that Adobe could do was to hook-up with IBM, Sun, and NeXT with Display PostScript on OS/2, NEWS, and NeXTstep, respectively. The bottomline is that Adobe lost the Font War, a war of its own making. It seems not to have learned.

Quark, Macromedia & Vista

This is an excellent opportunity for Quark to win back some business. Jobs pushed InDesign when Quark was slow with their OS X version so I'm willing to bet that you'll start seeing Quark and Freehand demos in Steve's next bake off.

And if you think this transition is bad, tell your IT people this is nothing compared to the M$ Vista transition looming on the horizon. Every PC you now have in your office will have to be replaced.

Reality?

"I'd give anything to have a photoshop razed to the ground and rebuilt with all of the lesson learned over the years"

"I can't believe there isn't another decent bitmap image editor out there. As someone else mentioned, maybe this is an opportunity..."

I think you guys just explained why there is no Photoshop competitor, and why it will take so long for Adobe to transition Photoshop.

Maybe it isn't as easy as you all think!

I remember when CoreImage was announced and Tiger came out, and all the Mac people were like "Oh, Photoshop is dead now, look at those real-time effects! Why doesn't Photoshop use CoreImage!" And the Photoshop engineers (on the Adobe boards) were like "CoreImage isn't perfect" and all the Mac people were like "Apple developers will use CoreImage to kill Photoshop then!"

Well, here we are, quite a ways down the line, CoreImage is out there, why hasn't anyone built anything close to a Photoshop killer with it? Apple puts out Aperture, builds it on CoreImage, why was there an immense backlash and it no longer looks like it can replace Photoshop?

Maybe Adobe really does know what it's doing, and they're just trying to do it right, and not halfway. I rely on their products for my income and I sure wouldn't want them to rush them out for Intel half-tested just to shut up the "Ship it now!" crowd.

GIMP

Oh C'mon

A lot of discussion happening here about people saying that there is now an opportunity for Apple or another competitor to kick Photoshop off its throne. Well It's not going to happen. Why? First of, us graphic designers who actually 'purchase' these essential tools. Photoshop, illustrator, Indesign and Acrobat Professional work seamlessly together. Makes our job easier and quicker. h*** they nearly share the same keyboard shortcuts. Secondly Photoshop is supported with other mainstream digital imaging products that it has also become a very important tool. Thirdly, Graphic designers also work with other companies such as Printers and Digital bereaus. It's easier for us to talk each others languages if we are using the same products.